Tag: Intruder

It started just after I was potty trained. My parents got a kick out of watching me stumble into the living room, then the kitchen, then a closet, until I finally found my way to the bathroom. That’s usually what my sleepwalking is. Just trying to find a bathroom so I could pee. As I got older, I thought I’d stopped until my roommate showed me a video of myself walking into the living room, declaring that I was going to wal-mart, and then curling up on the sofa. She and I both laughed pretty hard at that. After that I just considered it an weird personal quirk. I went on to graduate college and get a job as a pharmacy technician, got married, and had my son, Tyler. My wife saw me sleep walk a few times, and she was a little creeped out by it. Rather than laughing, she’d gently lead me back to bed.

It never affected my life. We were a little family of three, and the happiest in the world, it seemed. My son was the light of my life. I was ‘momma’ and my wife was ‘mommy’ and he was most definitely a momma’s boy. He’d run out to the car every day after school to show me his report cards and drawings. At age 6, he was already a pretty talented artist, and his favorite thing to draw was zebras. It came as no surprise, then, that when Halloween rolled around, he wanted to be a zebra. My wife bought his costume and apologized again and again for having to work, but as a nurse, I knew she really didn’t have a choice. I promised to take plenty of pictures. I was going as a fortune teller, and I carried a large paperweight for my ‘crystal ball’. We had a wonderful time. Plenty of kids ran up to me and asked for their fortunes, and I usually told them I predicted they’d get lots of candy. My son got enough candy to feed his entire classroom, though of course he wouldn’t even let me have one piece. Jerk. We got home and I got him up to bed, poured a glass of wine, put on some netflix and totally stole some of my son’s candy. I woke up to my wife laying a blanket over me and tip-toeing in the direction of our bedroom.

“I’m awake,” I said. She turned and smiled at me and melted my heart. I held the edge of the blanket up and she snuggled in beside me.

From this point on, I will continue the story exactly how my mother told it to me:

At the time, my parents, my sister, and I were in the process of moving across the country, and when this incident occurred we were just days away from leaving our old home for our new one. This meant that just about everything we owned had already been packed and shipped off to the new house, so we ended up spending our final few nights curled up in sleeping bags on the floor.

My sister Roxanne and I were sleeping together in one bedroom while our parents slept across the hall in another. It was during the summer, and since we didn’t have air conditioning at the time, we would regularly leave our bedroom window cracked open in order to relieve some the stuffiness that filled the house during those months. Our house was a single story, and our bedroom faced the front yard. You might be thinking that this wasn’t a very wise decision given the circumstances, but we spent many nights before this the exact same way and never once had a problem. Not until this horrifying encounter.

I live in Northern Wisconsin, where most of my family calls home. Except for my Father’s side of the family. They live in the middle of Minnesota, almost a 3 hour drive away from us. First and foremost, my family, especially my Father’s side, is very religious. Which is a large reason of why they never believe my odd experiences. I have never been the favored child either, always the clumsy and outcasted one. The one with the wild imagination. Two of the only family members around my age are my cousins, R and S. (For their privacy I will refer to them as their first initials). R is 9 months older than me, but always tries to act like I am the baby cousin. S is around 2 years older than me. We have always been close, when we were little we would take our Grandma’s hat pins, go around in a circle to each pick one, and then spill a secret to eachother, but recently we have been growing apart. It doesn’t help that I live so far away, or that I am having troubles with anxiety and depression. But back then, we were all attached by the hip.

The story begins at my Grandparent’s, with R and I begging to have a sleepover, they refused because she had church the next day. But our constant nagging and the thought of me not being able to spend time with her guilted our parents into letting me spend the night. Soon S arrived also, I was excited because I haven’t seen them in a very long time, and I had missed them. R’s house was a big one. There were 4 floors, including the basement. The main floor, with the kitchen and living room, upstairs with her parent’s room and two of her younger sister’s room along with the bathroom, downstairs with R’s and her other sister’s room, and finally the basement with its dark atmosphere, cold cement floors, and lots of closets. When we got settled in, i took a look around her room. Raggedy Ann dolls covered her shelves, normal for her but unsettling for me.

We were up for a while, talking and giggling. Then we soon fell asleep. I had a night terror about bugs crawling over me, ladybugs and ants. I woke up seeing them covering the bed with their squirming 6 legged bodies. I panicked but didnt want to wake my cousins up. Soon my eyes adjusted, and they disappeared. I was too tired to question what had just happened, so I went back to sleep. Suddenly, after what felt like seconds, I woke back up. I looked around, it was pitch black. Then, by movements my cousins made, I realized we were all awake. S and I were wide awake, feeling unsettled, but R was groggy and ready to go back to sleep, so she turned to face the closet. I looked out her open door and I swear i saw a faint glowing blue light coming from the top of the stairs. I told myself it probably wasn’t that late, so R’s parents were still up watching T.V.

This is the original reddit thread where I wrote the story; this is a slightly edited-for-grammar version.

I was around 16 when this happened, so 12 or so years ago. I’d just gotten my license and had come back to my mother’s house to work on a paper because her computer was faster than my father’s. It was getting a bit late, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I wasn’t nervous one way or the other. I took a break from the paper and headed to the main bathroom, which was at the back of the house. The wall parallel to the door faced the back yard.

It has a small window in it, and just as I was about to turn on the lights, I heard a noise. Not especially close, or loud, but it was coming from somewhere in the back yard, closer to the house than the small patch of dense trees that acted as kind of a buffer between the street my house was on and the one that runs parallel to it

To start, I’d like to give a little description of my where my story took place. I lived in a southwestern Missouri town with the typical middle-of-nowhere feel. The town itself had a population of only 2,000, and it was just big enough to have its own school district. There were about 200 kids total from pre-K to 12th, and we all shared the same campus. The school was divided into high school, junior high, and elementary wings.

I was in junior high at the time. The building that housed us was old and falling apart. It looked as if someone cut a straight hallway out from the main campus and built a breezeway between them. Because of that separation, it was closer to the street than the other wings.

Specifically, I was social studies when the headache-inducing doorbell sound started. We all had been through intruder drills before. Us students packed into the corner and shut off the lights, while the teacher locked the door. She hushed us as we all sat bored and annoyed on the floor. We were, admittedly, being loud.